Pinpoint authentication watermarking based on a chaotic system

Watermarking technique is one of the active research fields in recent ten years, which can be used in copyright management, content authentication, and so on. For the authentication watermarking, tamper localization and detection accuracy are two important performances. However, most methods in literature cannot obtain precise localization. In addition, few researchers pay attention to the problem of detection accuracy. In this paper, a pinpoint authentication watermarking is proposed based on a chaotic system, which is sensitive to the initial value. The approach can not only exactly localize the malicious manipulations but reveal block substitutions when Holliman-Memon attack (VQ attack) occurs. An image is partitioned into non-overlapped regions according to the requirement on precision. In each region, a chaotic model is iteratively applied to produce the chaotic sequences based on the initial values, which are determined by combining the prominent luminance values of pixels, position information and an image key. Subsequently, an authentication watermark is constructed using the binary chaotic sequences and embedded in the embedding space. At the receiver, a detector extracts the watermark and localizes the tampered regions without access to the host image or the original watermark. The precision of spatial localization can attain to one pixel, which is valuable to the images observed at non-ordinary distance, such as medical images and military images. The detection accuracy rate is defined and analyzed to present the probability of a detector making right decisions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our algorithm.